A document preparation project, such as writing the user manuals for the Unix operating system, can involve many authors collectively writing tens of manuals comprising thousands of pages. In such a project an author of one manual section often needs to reference or include in their section data or information from different sections and/or manuals.
In a conventional document preparation system an author needing to find such information must laboriously scan the other sections and/or manuals until they find the file that contains the desired information.
Once an author finds the desired information, they can employ one of many prior art mechanisms to incorporate the found information in the target document. For example, a hypertext link that references the desired information can be inserted into the target document that causes the linked information to be printed out whenever the target document is printed.
Today, this method is generally only possible when the link and the cross-referenced material are in the same manual. This method does not work in any commercially-available system when information needs to be accessed across multiple manuals. However, this too might also be possible given World Wide Web technology. As an alternative to automatic incorporation the author can simply copy the information into their own section.
The prior art document preparation methodology becomes unmanageably complex and inefficient when many authors from different groups and in different physical locations cooperate to write multiple manuals of a large product or project. Additional complexity is added when the documents are being written or updated concurrently, in which case the search for current or a correct version of the information to link could be never ending.
Generally, the cross-reference is limited to standard entities supported in the document preparation system, such as chapters, figures, sections, etc. An author might wish to import only a small part of another author's document that is not necessarily characterized as a standard textual unit (e.g., section, chapter, figure, table, list, etc.). For example, an author might want to import part of a phrase that specifies a value for a parameter that appears in more than one document. Using prior art mechanisms, such as tables of contents or indices, it would be difficult to provide meaningful information about such importable information that would enable the author to find it, let alone import it.